Underground

by Kat Richardson

  Outside of his body, his remembered shape formed in my grip, and Lass glowered at me and tried to twist away. I clutched him hard. His mouth began to move—

  A noise like a train wreck wiped out all other sound and rocked me back onto my heels. Sisiutl’s screech of defiance rose on a black plume of smoke from where my Rover had been—the pissed-off monster had taken out my truck. Quinton, holding an unfamiliar cell phone, shot a look toward the parking lot and then back to me.

  “Harper?”

  Shuddering from the contact, I fought to my feet, never letting Lass’s specter go. “It’s going to be a long walk home with this bastard.”

  Quinton peered at what must have been empty mist between my hands to him. “What . . . ?”

  “It’s Lass—the incorporeal part, at least,” I growled from the flashing heat/cold its touch wrought on my bones. “I wish I had a bottle to put him in. . . .”

  Nearby, Fish was struggling with Ben, making pads of fabric and strapping them over the bleeding wounds on his side. “One of you call 911, damn it! I don’t want this guy back on my table tomorrow!”

  “Already done,” Quinton said. Time had passed without my notice. “We lost Lass.”

  I glared at him before I realized he was talking to Fish.

  In the murky distance, sirens wailed toward us. I stumbled a few steps to where Fish was working, shirtless in the cold. “How bad?” I asked.

  “Bad,” he snapped, tying off another strip of fabric from what had been his shirt. “We might get lucky—his body temp was already down and heading for hypothermia from the dunking so he’s not bleeding as fast as he should be, but he’s shocky and he could collapse. I hope I remember how to save a life instead of studying the remains of one. . . .”

  I backed away, giving a speculative look at the struggling ghost in my hands. If Albert could do it . . .

  “Don’t,” Quinton said, putting his hand on my shoulder.

  “What?”

  “I can see you thinking it. Don’t try to save Ben by putting Lass in his body. Even if it worked, it would be wrong.”

  Carlos’s words to the same effect echoed in my head and I found the irony painful.

  “I can’t keep holding on,” I said. “He’s . . . slippery.”

  “You could let go. . . .”

  “No! There’s something undone here, and Lass is the one who has to do it—to put it right.” I shuddered, hating the idea that had come into my mind. “I’ll have to hold him myself.”

  The sirens were closer and distant strobes of red and blue bounced off the fog. Time was running out.

  “Quinton,” I said, catching his eye as he tried to watch everything. “I’ll have to be a little . . . thinner. I don’t want the medics to see me do this.”

  Quinton was a little confused. “Do what?”

  “Take this . . . inside,” I said, shaking the protesting ghost of Lass.

  “No! Harper—”

  “Only choice left. Keep an eye out,” I added, taking the wet pheasant feather from my bag and sliding into the Grey with the fingers of one hand twined in the knotted energy remains of Lass.

  The shape of the dead man grew more solid as I sank deeper into the Grey until the silvered mist gave way to the burning black and colored light of the grid. Lass was a blazing gold wire frame of a man in my grip, twisting and writhing and more immediate than the merely bright knots that were Quinton and Fish . . . and the dimming skein of Ben. Wygan had stuck a bit of Grey into me once. Now I’d have to see if I could do it myself and hope it wasn’t so permanent this time.

  I pulled the living fire of Lass’s ghost into a tight ball as it fought and twisted to escape. Then I stroked the feather over my own face and chest, feeling my shape loosen as the grid thrummed with fury and the screams of something in the grip of terror.

  Time tilted and spread in a pool of mercury and rust. Heavy in the slowing of time, I pressed the harsh light that was Lass against my chest, pushing it deeper with the feather and my hands until I felt something crack and yield. We floated half incorporated, half apart, and mad with excess of life and death until the pain drew a whimper from my throat and then flared up in a blaze of agony as my own shape closed around the bindle of the dead man’s energy.

  I reeled back to the normal, panting and crying with the pangs of Lass’s dying ripping through me. Quinton caught me but only barely in my still-thin state. I sucked breath in between my teeth, gritting them against the slashing agony of the dead man’s presence.

  “Harper . . . ? Are you all right?” Quinton asked, his face creased with fear, the Grey swirling around him in swathes of anxious green and orange.

  I shook my head, not trusting my voice to remain steady, not to rise to a scream. The flashing lights of the Medic One unit were static near the smoking spire that rose from the Rover and the sirens had stopped. I could barely hear the splashing of feet through the mud above the screeching feedback whine of the Grey in my head as the paramedics headed toward us. I staggered toward Ben and Fish who knelt beside him, shaking his head.

  He looked up. “What have we done? What happened? I don’t know what to tell them. ‘A monster came out of the marsh and killed them’?”

  “Ben’s . . . dead?” I ground out, feeling my head spin and my guts drop in horror. The worlds shook me between them and I felt like a banner torn by the wind.

  Fish shook his head. “Not yet. But Sisiutl—and that man. My God . . . What did we do?” Then he glared at me. “What did you do? This is because of you.”

  I shook my head. “No. Sisiutl—”

  “It’s a legend! It’s a story, like Qamaits and Tsonoqua bringing nightmares and eating children! It doesn’t exist!” He clasped his head in his hands as if it was going to explode while he groped for sanity in the face of what he’d seen. “It can’t! Oh, God, it can’t! This can’t be happening!”

  Lass tore at me and screamed in my head and I tottered, trying to keep my feet but falling to my knees beside Fish. I grabbed the babbling man by the shoulders, partially just to steady myself, and shook him, stuffing down the shrieks of Lass’s fury and my pain. “Then,” I gulped, choking out each word, “blame . . . me.”

  Fish’s eyes went wide in horror as he stared at me, as if I, too, were a nightmare. His lips trembled to form words, but they didn’t come out.

  “It’s . . . all me,” I ordered, and Fish nodded stiffly, shaking.

  I tried to turn, but weakness dragged at me as the raging torment of Lass imprisoned in my head and body tore through me, blinding me with red veils of agony, so that I didn’t know where Quinton was—where anyone or anything was.

  “You have to go,” I gasped, hoping Quinton was still nearby. “Don’t let them get you.”

  I didn’t see him beside me or feel his touch through Lass’s stabbing and slashing inside, but I could hear Quinton say, “You’re out of your mind.”

  “Yes,” I started. Then the pain broke me and I screamed, falling into the bleeding blackness between the grid and down, shrieking, to oblivion.

  TWENTY

  Swimming in the dark and the residual pain with Lass half heartedly cursing me made the bed very uncomfortable. I didn’t like the bed: it had too many pillows and it smelled of too much bleach and something metallic. A discomfiting languor had fallen on both of us—Lass and me—and I felt I would never surface from the of us—Lass and me—and I felt I would never surface from the wreck of sleep. It was the way my fingers tingled and burned that got me to open my eyes.

  The room was a soft mint green and my heart jumped with fear. I remembered the room. The last time I’d been in such a room I’d just finished being dead. I jerked up—or, rather, I didn’t, as my left arm twisted and yanked me to a stop with a yelp. Someone’s hands pressed against my right shoulder.

  “Shhh . . . Don’t jump around like that. You’ll hurt yourself.”

  That was Quinton’s voice. I blinked grit and gummy tears from my eyes and turned my head toward
him. With no hat or coat and his long hair brushed down around his shoulders, he didn’t look himself. A battered and jury-rigged palmtop computer sat on the side table between us, and he put a stylus down on top of it as he leaned toward me.

  He gave me a thin smile. “Hi.”

  I tried to bring my hands together to rub my tingling fingers, but the left one didn’t move more than an inch and that with a sudden stop and a steely clank. The right had an IV needle in the back and a patch of tape holding the feed line in place. I rattled the other hand again, still a bit disoriented. This was Harborview . . . wasn’t it? A hospital bed . . . So why couldn’t I move? I hadn’t broken anything. . . .

  “They handcuffed you to the bed,” Quinton explained. “The cops are a bit upset about Ben and . . . the other guy, and Fish wasn’t making a lot of sense. Detective Solis just thought it was better to hang onto you as a material witness—or a suspect— until he knew what happened.”

  “What—” The sound that came out of my mouth didn’t qualify as speech. I had to swallow and try again. “What are you doing here?”

  “I said I’d keep an eye on you, didn’t I? So I am. You were a little scary there before you passed out, but once you were unconscious you looked normal, so the medics weren’t freaked out by that. They weren’t happy though—you give really strange vital signs. I don’t know what’s up with Ben yet. He was in surgery earlier and I’ve been—”

  The room door swung open and admitted Solis, cloaked in a violent boil of red and orange. He glowered at us and walked to the other side of the bed to do it up close. He shot a sharp glance at Quinton.

  “You can go, Mr. Lassiter,” Solis said.

  Quinton looked at me, a line forming between his eyebrows. I rolled my eyes back to Solis. “I prefer he stay,” I replied, fighting the feel of slipping deeper into the Grey as other words tried to push into my mouth.

  The detective’s lips tightened in a hard line. Solis simmered but finally shrugged ungraciously. “As you like. Residue on your hands shows you have recently fired a gun. Multiple shots. At whom were you shooting?” he demanded.

  “At whom do you imagine?” I asked. I didn’t mean to be flippant, it just came out on the drift of whatever drugs the hospital had given me. Reality seemed terrifyingly remote, especially with Lass struggling inside my head. “Has someone been shot?”

  Solis’s expression was volcanic. “No. But shots were fired and one man is dead, another critically injured. Previous bodies in the historic district are dead of similar wounds, and you at the scene of the last three—imagined I didn’t spot you? Do I care that they are not shot? No! I care that this coincidence cannot possibly be a coincidence. There is a linking cause and you know what it is. Of this I am sure.”

  “What . . . did Reuben Fishkiller tell you?” I asked, fighting Lass who screamed in my head about dogs and snakes and monsters. “I only remember something big . . . from the fog . . . and trying to drive it away.”

  “Mr. Fishkiller says”—Solis paused to snort in derision— “a monster attacked you all. Throughout this investigation I hear ‘a monster came from the sewer.’ Now it’s a monster from the fog.”

  I shrugged, one-sided, tilting my head and raising my eyebrows. “That’s what it was!” Lass blurted through me. I pushed him back down, feeling sweat start on my face. “But maybe . . . a dog?” I added. “Or a bear? A bear ran amok in the University District last year. . . .”

  Solis snorted. “Where is the body if you shot it? Why is it that where your cases touch mine, hell breaks loose and the mysterious becomes common?”

  I shrugged, choking Lass’s shrieks of terror.

  “Bad karma,” Quinton suggested.

  Solis retrained his gimlet stare on Quinton. “Is that your explanation, Mr. Lassiter?”

  Quinton shrugged also. “Don’t know. Maybe it’s just that Ms. Blaine attracts strange things.”

  Solis nodded and looked sour. “Indeed. You were there? You saw this monster from the fog?”

  Quinton shook his head. “No.”

  “What did you see? You were there when the Medic One unit arrived.”

  “Nothing—there was nothing to see.”

  Solis shook his head in disgust. “Why were you all in the marsh to begin with?”

  “My fault,” I croaked. “Following . . .” I cast a look at Quinton and hoped I was guessing right—and could keep Lass quiet long enough to finish. “Purlis.”

  “Who is Purlis?” Solis snapped.

  “The dead man. I think,” I added. “Identity was clouded. The link you wanted . . . may have been him.”

  Solis calmed and the fire that ringed him banked to a tight, hot gleam. “Clouded . . . You’ll say he was part of an investigation, no doubt.”

  “A tangent. Mucking in your sandbox, Solis. Sorry.”

  “What do you know about him? How did he connect to this?”

  I felt exhausted from my aches, from restraining the dead man raging in my head, and from trying to keep myself in the normal. “Present at the crimes. Ran when asked about them. No more than that.”

  “No background?”

  I shook my head; sweat stung my eyes. “Broken, blocked. Government-sealed files. Why I wanted to talk to him.”

  Solis grunted to himself, the colors around him shifting more to yellow and away from furious red. “I am to turn this case over to a federal officer,” he said, as if to himself. “Classified. None of Homicide’s business.”

  I wanted to tell him to leave me alone if that was the case, but I kept my mouth shut.

  “I wish I knew . . .” he muttered, and fell silent for a long moment.

  “Am I under arrest?” I asked at last.

  He had seemed distracted but snapped back to a ferocious focus on me as he answered. “Not yet.” He leaned over and unlocked the cuff from my wrist and the bed. Then he straightened again. “But if Benjamin Danziger dies, it’s you I will come for first—Federals or no.” He looked at each of us, his eyes narrowed. He saw something that satisfied his scrutiny and left the room without another word, tucking the handcuffs into his coat pocket as he went.

  I slumped into the bed, feeling Lass fall back down from his fighting and clawing now that there was no one to cry to. The Grey was thicker and more present than usual and I hoped Lass was as exhausted as I. I glanced at Quinton.

  “You changed files?” I whispered.

  Quinton watched Solis leave. “Yes. If they check, it’s officially J.J. Purlis who’s dead. I hope Fern will let it go, not try to convince someone I’m still out here. It’s the easy way out for her and once she’s retired, she may not care, so long as I never turn up to embarrass her. And I don’t plan to.” He looked at me and frowned. “You look horrible.”

  “Thank you. Lass . . . fights.”

  “It’s bad, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. “The sooner I’m rid of him, the better.”

  “We have to get out of here. They didn’t know what was wrong with you, so they said shock. I think you can check yourself out, now that Solis has removed the handcuffs.”

  I let Quinton help me get up and get dressed. He pressed a kiss against my temple as I leaned on him. I was tired and rubber-legged, even as we crept down to Critical Care to check on Ben. It wouldn’t matter to me if Solis could hang me on a felony murder hook; if Ben died it would be my fault and I’d wish I was already dead.

  We came out of the elevator and headed for CCU. I stopped cold at the sight of a figure in a black coat swishing into the CCU nurses’ station. I caught Quinton’s arm and pulled him back behind the corner to listen out of sight.

  “Yes, dear. Has Detective Solis come down to look in on Mr. Danziger?”

  “Naturally, it’s Laguire who’s stepping on Solis’s toes,” I muttered. I couldn’t hear the nurse’s reply as more than a mumble, but I’d recognized the coat’s owner, even from the back. Quinton’s face went stiff and white at the sound of Laguire’s voice.

  “Really? Well,
thank you, dear. I’ll look for him upstairs. And I understand the morgue is also in this building . . . ?”

  “Always tasteful, Fern,” Quinton muttered. “The coroner’s fingerprint check sent up a flare. Don’t know why I thought she’d be slower off the mark.”

  “She wants to see your supposed corpse,” I hissed.

  “She won’t recognize it, since she hasn’t seen me in years. It’s not a great patch—it may not hold—but for now, the file swap will keep her off me and might convince her bosses to consider me dead. They’ll recall her to Fort Meade for now whether she likes it or not. Fern may not buy it, but she can’t argue that the body doesn’t line up with the file info—Lass was actually a decent match, once they scrub off the filth. She couldn’t tell us apart if I walked up and kissed her.”

  “Kiss that icicle and all bets are off.” A shudder of the ghost thrashing ripped across my frame and almost brought me to my knees. I guessed Lass didn’t like being a decoy. I could feel him trying to crack me open and escape and I didn’t think I’d enjoy the process if he did. I gasped from the twisting pain. “We need to get out of here and get rid of Lass.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  We evaded Laguire and escaped from the hospital to a taxi that took us to my condo in West Seattle. The temperature was nearly normal for Seattle in winter, and it wasn’t until we were outside I realized it was Wednesday—I’d been in the hospital overnight. Laguire hadn’t been as fast to respond as I’d thought.

  At the condo, the ferret huddled in her nest and refused to have anything to do with me, twitching her head and backing away as if I smelled bad when I offered her a hand. Couldn’t blame her—me smelling of ghosts and monsters, carrying an angry spirit that lashed at me and screamed continually. I had to let Quinton take care of her while I took a shower. Chaos didn’t seem to mind that—being fond of him and his many interesting pockets.